For Reporters
WHAT: The University of Virginia Library invites you to preview its newest exhibition, “Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift,” prior to public opening, and to interview chief curator John Edwin Mason, a UVA associate professor of history and documentary photographer.
“Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift,” a new exhibition at the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, showcases portraits that African Americans in central Virginia commissioned from the Holsinger Studio during the first decades of the 20th century. The photographs express the individuality of the women and men who commissioned them, while silently yet powerfully asserting their claims to rights and equality. Opening Sept. 22, the exhibition is the result of years of research by UVA professors, students, and community members.
The Holsinger Studio Collection, held in the Small Special Collections Library, includes about 10,000 glass plate negatives taken by the Holsinger Studio of life in Charlottesville and Albemarle County from the 1890s to the 1920s. Many of the photographs were commissioned portraits and more than 600 of those portraits are of African American citizens in central Virginia.
The “Visions of Progress” exhibition will feature almost 100 Holsinger Studio portraits and reveal new biographical information about the subjects unearthed over the past few years by the Holsinger Studio Portrait Project team.
Media participants will gather at 9:30 a.m. at the Main Gallery and will be guided through the exhibition by chief curator John Edwin Mason, with opportunities for an exclusive interview. Please RSVP to elyse@virginia.edu by Friday, September 16, 2022, to attend.
WHEN: Monday, September 19, 9:30–11 a.m.
WHERE: Main Gallery of UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library
***Press Release***
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 14, 2022
Media Contact: Elyse Girard | elyse@virginia.edu | 434.987.5665
“Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift,” a new exhibition at the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, showcases portraits that African Americans in central Virginia commissioned from the Holsinger Studio during the first decades of the 20th century. The photographs express the individuality of the women and men who commissioned them, while silently yet powerfully asserting their claims to rights and equality. Opening Sept. 22, the exhibition is the result of years of research by UVA professors, students and community members.
The Holsinger Studio Collection, held in the Small Special Collections Library, includes about 10,000 glass plate negatives taken by the Holsinger Studio of life in Charlottesville and Albemarle County from the 1890s to the 1920s. Many of the photographs were commissioned portraits and more than 600 of those portraits are of African American citizens in central Virginia.
The portraits were taken during the height of the Jim Crow era, when state laws enforced racial segregation in the South and the Ku Klux Klan had local chapters in the Albemarle region. “The magic of these portraits is that you don’t see the oppression in them,” said John Edwin Mason, chief curator of the exhibition. “And that was intentional on the part of the people who had their images made.”
Mason, a UVA associate professor of history and a documentary photographer, has directed the Holsinger Studio Portrait Project since 2015; a partnership with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities director Worthy Martin in 2018 provided the project with a web presence to share their research. The project team works to uncover stories about the portrait subjects and give a more accurate picture of African American life in early 20th-century Virginia. “We use these portraits not simply to enjoy for their beauty as aesthetic objects, but to see history through them, to tell history through them,” said Mason.
The “Visions of Progress” exhibition will feature almost 100 Holsinger Studio portraits and reveal new biographical information about the subjects unearthed over the past few years by the Holsinger Studio Portrait Project team. Some of the portrait subjects are community leaders, including Dr. George Ferguson – one of the first Black physicians to open a practice in central Virginia – and his son, who went on to be president of the local branch of the NAACP in the 1950s. (See press kit for this portrait and further biographical information.)
But most of the African Americans who commissioned portraits from the Holsinger Studio had working-class jobs. By dressing so beautifully for the camera, the portrait sitters were pushing back against racist caricatures that were common in American media during that era, Mason said. “They are saying, ‘We are not who you think we are. We are not those stereotypes; we are not defined by our status in Jim Crow society.’ ”
A Community Effort
In 2019, supported by a grant from Virginia Humanities, the Holsinger Studio Portrait Project partnered with the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center to host a “Family Photo Day,” where participants could examine the Holsinger Studio portraits in flipbooks and add comments if they had any information about the subjects. More than 300 people attended.
That same year, the team also installed 30 of the portraits around the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers construction site, drawing attention from hundreds of passers-by each day. Two Charlottesville community members, Descendants of Enslaved Communities at UVA co-chair DeTeasa Brown Gathers (who found a photo of her great-great grandmother in the Holsinger Studio Collection) and local realtor Edwina St. Rose, joined the project as community advisors.
In 2020, Holly Robertson, curator of University Library Exhibitions, reached out to Mason to suggest co-sponsoring an exhibition after seeing the enthusiasm the Holsinger Portrait Project garnered on Grounds in the community.
“The Holsinger Studio portraits have been an important part of the UVA Library’s collections since the 1970s,” Robertson said. “We’ve done so much work to describe and provide access to the collection – it was one of the first photographic collections we fully digitized in the late 1990s, and each portrait is available online through Virgo. Yet, we’ve never exhibited this collection. As the Holsinger Studio Portrait Project grew, we saw a wonderful opportunity to partner in telling the stories of Black central Virginians through our amazing collections.”
A significant grant from the Jefferson Trust earlier this year, awarded to the University’s Corcoran Department of History, IATH, and the UVA Library, is supporting the “Visions of Progress” exhibition, as well as other community programs. (In March, the team launched a pop-up exhibition of the Holsinger photos at the Northside branch of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library.) “Our trustees were fascinated to learn that such an interesting collection of African American history is held by the University,” said Amy Bonner, director of grants at the Jefferson Trust. “The opportunity to help launch such a powerful exhibition and support the associated research was impossible to pass up.”
A brochure of the portraits will be freely available at the opening, and the Project website, built by IATH, will live on after the exhibition ends in June 2023. Mason also plans to “take the exhibition off Grounds and into the community,” visiting schools, religious organizations, and civic groups, with support from the Jefferson Trust grant. Mason and Library staff members urge exhibition visitors who might recognize ancestors or have any information about the portrait subjects to email the team at HolsingerStudio@virginia.edu.
“We want to change the way that everyone in central Virginia sees our shared history,” Mason said.
Public Exhibition Opening Details
The public opening celebration for “Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift” will be held on Sept. 22 in the Main Gallery of UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library from 5-8 p.m.
John Edwin Mason will host two rounds of gallery talks that evening: one at 5:30 p.m., another at 6:30 p.m.
Kendall King and Jalane Schmidt, curators of another UVA Library exhibition, “No Unity Without Justice: Student and Community Organizing During the 2017 Summer of Hate,” will speak in the First Floor Gallery at 6 and 7 p.m.
This event is free, but registration is required: 100 tickets will be released via EventBrite for the 5:30/6:00 talks, and another 100 for the 6:30/7:00 talks. Register here: https://Visions-UVA.eventbrite.com
A shuttle will run from the Jefferson School African American Center to the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at UVA every 30 minutes from 4-8 p.m. for the public opening celebration (on September 22, 2022). Registered attendees may also request a code to park for free in the Central Grounds Garage.